Google NGram chart shows the resurgence of the word “uncanny” to currently match its high point in 1928.

One can’t help but see the two high points of the term — cresting in 1928 and almost at the very same point in 2008 (though I suspect the chart would be at an all time high if it reflected today’s rate in 2015). What does this tell us? What speculations can we make about this?

Well, as much as it might mean nothing whatsoever, the chart does make us wonder about correlations. And perhaps it does provide some indication of the circulation of the term in common parlance, which is pertinent to my study of the popular uncanny.

I would suggest that the term is a meme that circulates more frequently during times when a culture is unconsciously registering a “return of the repressed.” In other words, it’s reasonable to argue that the chart above points to times over the century when writers were grappling with a feeling of unease, deja vu or strange familiarity — since they were using the term to describe this phenomena more or less often in their writing. One could point to cultural tensions like, say, World Wars or economic recessions and depressions and suggest these are historically linked to such anxiety. But for the time being, I am looking at this chart and considering how it reflects the term’s usage as a critical apparatus. If we label the chart with a few of the key publications related to the phenomenology of the Uncanny, we can see their relationship to these trends fairly easily:

A few key texts in Uncanny theory.

It seems fairly clear to me that Freud’s touchstone essay on “Das Unheimlich,” published in 1919 (responding to Jentsch’s 1906 essay on the topic) was as much a product of its time as it was a contributor to it. I want to speculate that Freud’s discussion of the term as a critical concept as much as a word to describe a feeling led to coining the term as a “buzz” word, as well. So it makes sense that the word would rise in popularity for the decade or so following the publication of “Das Unheimlich,” reaching its high point in usage in the period between 1920 and 1940 — even if this was not necessarily Freud’s most notable article during the period (which may have been”Beyond the Pleasure Principle” — with its uncanny-related concepts of the Death Drive and “repetition compulsion” as it related to war veterans). Of course, Freud alone does not have ownership of the term. I believe popular/pulp fiction also contributed to its popularity during this period, with “uncanny” tales being labeled as such. And as the term becomes more familiar, more domesticated, more marketed, it begins to fall out of fashion.

So what brings us to the “second wave”? Anneleen Masschelein, in her book The Unconcept, has quite excellently accounted for the “canonization” of the term Uncanny by the “uncanny critics” of literary psychoanalysis in the 1980s and 90s — a historical argument that certainly is supported by this second wave of the uncanny in the NGram chart. Masschelein specifically points to 1970 as a turning point, when deconstructionists like Derrida, Todorov and Cixous were writing about the concept in relation to psychoanalysis and literature, at the same time as Lacanian critics were discussing the concept in their journals, producing a watershed of criticism among deconstructionists like J. Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler and others who employed the term in their writing. Thus, the surge evident in the chart between 1980 and 2000 really echoes the rise of the term in literary and cultural theory, as much as popular parlance.

Although not a party to such matters, Masahiro Mori’s concept of “the uncanny valley,” notably, was ALSO first published in this “turning point” year of 1970 (which ironically falls in the “valley” of this chart). But it was not really until a 2005 conference on Robotics that Mori’s famous phrase began circulating broadly in works by those interested in robot and android science, leading to the second high point of 2008, with no sign of decline, given its popular appearance in circles across the internet today, when popular culture has picked up on the phrase and we now see it more commoonly in gaming circles, in Science Fiction, in art theses, and even on TV shows like 30 Rock. Here’s a close up on the more-specific phrase, “uncanny valley,” as it has circulated since Mori’s publication of the concept in 1970, showing not only the rise in 2005 related to the robotics conference, but a definite leap in the years following 2005 up leading toward the unchartable figures that no doubt are even higher today.

The English circulation of the phrase ‘Uncanny Valley’ since Mori’s first publication of the theory in 1970.

In some ways this ascent of “uncanny valley” may soon be the dominant understanding of the uncanny, replacing the unheimlich of Freud and the deconstructionists, though Mori is certainly in some ways informed by Freud, even if the phrase subordinates (or represses?) his original theory.

And though all of this charting and speculation is somewhat frivolous, in reflecting on these matters, I’m reminded of Freud’s etymological discussion of the terminology for the uncanny itself, and how in part one of his essay, he argues that the term “heimlich” (familiar) over time evolved into the “unheimlich” (strange) — leading to his great line about how “the un- is the token of repression.” So for kicks, I thought I’d pop both these words into Google’s NGram chart using German books to see how they compared:

Familiar and Strange: the terms converge in 1900 and begin to follow a “double” pattern of usage thereafter.

To my amazement: the terms unheimlich and heimlich almost converge in 1900 and set into a pattern that — dare I say it — “eerily” follows a parallel moevement thereafter, like an uncanny double. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In the following audio capture, author China Mieville delivers a keynote address entitled “On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) NOT Cannies.” It was presented at the 33rd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, in Spring 2012. Mieville performs an entertaining and trenchant re-examination of the term “uncanny” and offers a sly critique of its slippery value as a taxonomic tool.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

A transcript of the speech is available in the just-released Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Volume 23, No. 3, 2012. It is posted here with the permission of both China Mieville and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts…and my deep appreciation.

The Onion’s AV Club ran a great list of “23 Ridiculous Horror Movies” called “Night of the Killer Lamp” back in 2007. It’s actually a great list of films that would make for a fun marathon night of creepy-kookie horror films. What it proves, too, is that a) the horror genre is rife with “uncanny” objects at the center of their narratives (e.g. possessed dolls, plants and animals that have human agency, inanimate objects that move of their own accord, etc.), and that, b) the uncanny is often funny…especially when it fails.

One of many on the list is Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, which is hilarious but in my view also a very important film in the pantheon of the uncanny (see my essay in the book, The Films of Stephen King). For a quick example, here’s the soda machine scene, from youtube.

So how does it fail? Is a killer soda machine not scary? If not, what makes it inherently goofy?

I won’t go into a close reading of this particular scene. It’s easy enough to understand through the theory of the uncanny itself. One answer might be that the uncanny — like all fiction — requires a willing suspension of disbelief…but that the ideas here are so ludicrous that we are unwilling to do so. If our mental mastery remains in charge of our experience, keeping the “belief” in animistic actions at bay, then we invest no autonomous power or agency into the object.

In other words, we know they are puppets on a string. We must genuinely believe that the string has been cut when the puppet starts to dance in order to truly experience the uncanny.

Special effects are always attempting to cut that string. The low budget nature of these films (or simply their datedness, as effects have evolved) may prevent us from believing in their magic.

Even so, it may not be fair to entirely dismiss all the “killer lamp” films as simply “ridiculous.” There are moments in each of them — some more than others — where the uncanny can be experienced due mostly to the power of cinema technology to animate inanimate objects and thereby bring them to life. Hardcore realists might be too steeled up against the ludicrous to really suspend disbelief, but there remains something regressive about these films that might account for their sense of being ludicrous in the first place. They are aggressively regressive. They force us to engage in a childlike belief in the worlds they project. They work hard to resurrect our childish (or as Freud put it, “surmounted”) beliefs in a world where anything can potentially hold life and move on its own. Our laughter may very well be a defense mechanism against this return to our earlier beliefs — an attempt to affirm that our adult selves have surmounted them, in collective laughter.

Freud: “…a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and…there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.”

I have to laugh whenever I see this snowglobe of Sigmund Freud, which is on a shelf in my campus office. This came to me from my old friend from graduate school, Bill Hamilton, who picked it up during a trip to Vienna last year, when he visited the Sigmund Freud Museum among other things.

What an odd choice for a kitschy ball of faux-snow! The figure inside is hard to determine as Freud, but I like to imagine it is Freud wearing ski goggles. Or a character from Futurama.

A colleague once asked me if that was cocaine swirling around his head.

The snowglobe is hilarious, as all snowglobes are.

The other day I took the above photo because the look of it got me thinking about snowglobes themselves — balls of glass that swirl powder in a watery shell to create a three-dimensional snowfall scenario. It’s impossible not to think of Citizen Kane or childhood or giftshops. To me they seem to imply a moment “frozen in time” — much like a photograph — yet not still… in persistent motion. The snowfall effect, when it works correctly, and sustains a well-balanced drift over time, aligns the device with the “automaton.” Yet we must shake them to stir them to life — these are not robots with on-off switches.

Indeed, the snowglobe is unerringly physical in nature…seemingly alive, in that it is a globular, fragile vessel that contains liquid, despite its hard glass shell. It is fascinating to watch people make this odd gesture — the shaking of a snowball — and to see the change that momentarily comes across their features — the frustration or fear or desire on their faces. Some shake them violently. Some gently disturb the glass for fear of dropping it. Some swish them like brandy; others twist them upside down and up again with violent abandon. There is something going on there, some kind of wish fulfillment and dread, in that strange moment when they grasp and disturb the contents of the globe, followed by the look of hope in their eyes as they hold it up to the light.

I always want the snow to keep moving, so I never have to shake the globe again. But gravity always wins.

The snowglobe is always reminiscent of death until it is shaken into life. In this way it has the aura of the uncanny.

It is no wonder, then, that they are objects of kitsch commodity fetishism in popular culture. Every gift shop sells them, even when the objects in the globe have absolutely nothing to do with snow, winter, or white powder in any way. Their “liveliness” promises for a price to allow you to magically bring a memory back to life, through this fetish object that stands in for the memory. We just think of them as toys, but they are deceptively more like dreams. Nay, they are more akin to crystal balls than toys.

A former grad student of mine, WD Prescott, is running an interesting website bluntly called The Non-Horror Reader Survey that is studying what today’s readers think about the modern horror genre. It features interviews with various readers, writers, and scholars, along with a research questionnaire you can fill out, if you want to participate. It’s an interesting idea.

NHRS: You have a section of your website that is about the instances of the “uncanny,” or “unheimlich,” in popular culture. What are your thoughts on Freud’s theory of the “uncanny” and its relationship to Horror fiction?

MA: Since horror is the genre most associated with fear, it’s a natural that its authors and film directors would draw inspiration from the field of psychology. (There would be no Psycho without psychology!) Whether concerned with the twisted motives of gritty serial killers or the nightmare creatures of the supernatural, horror stories not only try to prick the “fight vs. flight” response of their readers, but also go exploring “the dark side” of the mind for material.

The “uncanny” is a part of that realm of fear. Only it’s less about abject dread and more about the frisson one feels when caught off-guard — it’s that surprising recognition we feel dawning on us, akin to déjà vu, that strange sense of “I have been here before” or that “life is but a dream.” Freud was the first to contemplate what it is that accounts for these disturbing feelings. In fiction, he suggests the “strangely familiar” is present not only in gothic tales of haunting, but also appears in the form of a whole series of icons that we find even in the present day in the horror genre: inanimate objects that move on their own accord, dolls that look back at you or speak with a human voice, dismembered limbs or possessed beings that seem to have minds of their own, the living dead, bizarre ominous symbols (666) that seem to be harbingers of doom, and so forth. He ultimately argues that these are all manifestations of secret childhood wishes we repressed, which shockingly “return” to us as adults with such intensity that we believe — if only for a moment — that our primitive instincts were right all along and that the reasonable, civilized world of adulthood has really been nothing more than a charade, a fiction.

Horror stories conjure those disturbing feelings and represent the “secret wishes” of characters in endlessly fascinating ways. One can study these stories for what they tell us not only about our animal or primitive beliefs, but also our social belief systems. This is what makes the uncanny a rich form of literary criticism, despite the way Freud’s work otherwise seems to serve some of the more problematic aspects of his psychoanalytical theories about castration anxiety and the Oedipal complex.

Nowadays, a possessed doll isn’t as scary as it used to be. Yet if told (or shown) right, it can still “getcha” when you least expect it. Or the doll has become something else: an android, an artificial intelligence, a computer. It’s all the same principle. That’s because we all still dream, we all still are a little uncertain about the universe, and we’re never as smart or in control as we think we are. In fact, that’s probably how I ultimately define horror literature: as the you’re not so smart as you thought you were, are you? genre. It bursts the bubbles of mankind, especially when it comes to our pretenses toward mastery over various domains. Perhaps this sounds like anti-intellectualism at work, but it’s the exact opposite. It questions and challenges what we take for granted. I love that edge of horror fiction, and I think the humorous audacity of it all has a lot to do with this.

Maybe I’m a little obsessed with it, but I see the same uncanny tropes from horror fiction evident everywhere in popular culture, particularly in advertising. To me, the Pillsbury Doughboy might as well be a Chucky doll. To me, the Doublemint Twins are doppelgangers. The Michelin Man is a monster. I am enthralled by the way the uncanny is used to fetishize commodities and sell us things we otherwise wouldn’t see a need to buy. I explored these ideas in my doctoral dissertation, which I’m currently revising into an academic book called The Popular Uncanny, which hopefully will be available from Guide Dog Books in 2011. For now, folks can visit my website to read my continuing notebook on the subject.

—Read the entire interview, where I field questions on teaching horror in college, horror’s relationship with humor and poetry, and the cautionary tale.

Mirrors, Doubles and Masks... Cover art for THE NEW UNCANNY designed by Sarah Eyre and David Eckersall

The book, essentially, is a literary experiment. All its contributors were challenged to read Freud’s seminal essay on “The Uncanny,” and then write a fresh fictional interpretation in order to explore what the Uncanny might mean 100 years later — today — in the 21st century, “to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps.”

The introduction by Ra Page is an excellent survey of “The Uncanny” in its own right, discussing how Freud provided a “literary template…a shopping list of shivers” that horror writers have managed to return to again and again over the past century. Page explains Freud’s essay in one of the most clear and careful ways I’ve ever seen in print. When discussing the tales in The New Uncanny, Page notes that the majority of the stories feature either the double or the doll most often, and turns to another essay on the Uncanny — Rilke’s “Dolls: On the Waxwork Dolls of Lotte Pritzel” (1913) — to discover convincing reasons why. I love the way Page concludes the introduction: “[The Uncanny] puts us on edge — that place we really should be from time to time — and reminds us: it’s us that’s alive.”

Keeping with the experimental spirit of this book, I thought I’d ask my “Psychos and the Psyche” class to review the book as a group. I have assigned each classmate a specific story in the book, and asked them to write a response (in a comment to this blog entry) that addresses the following three questions:

1) How does the author try to “update” the Freudian Uncanny in this story?
2) Does the story succeed as a work of uncanny literature?
3) What does the story teach us about the Uncanny in today’s culture?

[Warning: spoilers are inevitable!SURPRISES WILL LIKELY BE GIVEN AWAY. And all rights and opinions belong to the commenting students themselves. They will appear intermittently between now and the deadline of Oct 6th.]

Albert Grass led the Amateur Psychoanalytic group, who proposed to restore and renovate ther “Dreamland” park area as “the first amusement park ever devoted to the elucidation of dreams in accordance with the discoveries of Doctor Sigmund Freud M.D.” Grass’ sketches of the rides and attractions of the id are compelling works of art in themselves, such as the autonomous bumper cars that function as “unconscious drives — 25 cents!” (image at the top of this post is from good coverage of the exhibit at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York blog…which also features an interview with Beloff). The textual notes (“In the unconscious nothing dies…They (the drives) are zombies!”) are at once an accurate description of Freudian thought and an unsettling literalization of anxiety and desire.

As the museum’s press release for the exhibit explains, Grass’s sketches and plans included “a working architectural model consisting of a series of pavilions (The Unconscious, Dream Works, Consciousness, The Censor), linked by a miniature locomotive (The Train of Thought)…integrat[ing the Group’s]intellectual interests into its surroundings, in ways both serious and amusing.”

Grass, The Dome of the Unconscious: "Terror - In Consciousness We Experience Immediately The World Around Us"

How uncanny it would be to literally ride the unconscious and traipse along the pathways of the Dream Works. And I can only guess the horror of “The Censor” pavilion. By making the “figurative” elements of psychoanalytic theory “real,” the park attraction would have constituted an amazing fantasy adventure, but one that would resist the suspension of disbelief in that it would always already be a sort of projection of a conscious rationality in its very design. I suppose, there is a degree to which this is less an instance of the uncanny “confusion” between a symbol and what it symbolizes, and more a projection of the omnipotence of Freudian thought. Or, conversely, an artistic comment on Freudian thought as, itself, fantasy.

[NOTE: Those covers above go to amazon.com with an “associate” link — this was necessary to include the widget with cover graphics. To just visit librarything, not amazon, click here!]

What you see above is not a complete bibliography by ANY means. But over the past few years, I have slowly been adding books from my collection to LibraryThing.com — a nerdy site for amateur librarians, bibliophiles, English major types and book fetishists. The site includes a widget for adding a link to books in one’s “library” elsewhere, so I am sharing it (image above) with links/covers to my books “tagged” as uncanny. It’s not complete and it still needs to be updated…but I wanted to include it here anyway.

The site is a pretty useful library for research, I think. If you click through to librarything.com, you can do a full search for all titles tagged as “uncanny” on their site, which might be helpful in research. Or you can read all the other books exhibited in my profile…it’s like snooping around on another person’s bookshelf.